Eighth meeting of special rapporteurs,
representatives independent experts
and chairpersons of working groups
of the Commission on Human Rights
Item 11 of the provisional agenda

2. The recommendations of the joint meeting included the following (2)

(a) Information notes should be regularly submitted to each treaty body session about the activities of relevant special procedures mandates;

(b) Periodic lists of planned country visits of special procedures mandate holders should be prepared in chart form and made available to members of the treaty bodies;

(c) Executive summaries prepared for reports of special procedures mandate holders should be rapidly distributed to members of treaty bodies;

(d) A schedule of the consideration of reports of States parties to the major human rights treaty bodies should be prepared in chart form and circulated to all members of treaty bodies and special procedures mandate holders;

(e) The reports of special procedures mandate holders concerning specific countries should be distributed to treaty bodies when the latter are scheduled to consider the report of those specific countries and, conversely, the concluding observations of the treaty bodies on those countries should be circulated to special procedures mandate holders;

(f) Staff working with treaty bodies should facilitate the participation of country and thematic officers assisting special rapporteurs in the preparation of lists of issues on periodic reports to be considered by treaty bodies; conversely, assistants of special procedures mandate holders should seek from staff members servicing treaty bodies lists of issues and other relevant information from the treaty bodies for the purpose of preparation of country visits;

(g) A meeting between the treaty body teams and the country and thematic officers servicing special procedures should be called in a timely manner, to address existing problems or bottlenecks in information exchange.

3. The participants agreed that the third joint meeting should focus on follow-up to the recommendations of treaty bodies and special mandate holders. In keeping with that theme, the chairpersons have decided to request representatives of United Nations bodies and specialized agencies to participate in a discussion, at the thirteenth meeting of chairpersons, about their involvement in following up the concluding observations of treaty bodies through their activities at the national level.

4. Considerable cooperation and exchange of information among and between treaty bodies and special procedures is already taking place, particularly on subjects of direct relevance to the work of the parties concerned. However, the pattern is uneven and often depends on the particular working methods of each treaty body or special procedure. In most cases, such cooperation and exchange of information takes place among the staff who support the treaty bodies and special procedures and, consequently, the relevant experts may not always be aware of the extent of information exchange or cooperation.

5. To a large extent, cooperation and exchange of information is increasingly facilitated by the selective retrieval of information made possible by the continuing development of information technology within OHCHR. A number of initiatives are being or have been taken to improve the situation further, including the issuing in March 2001 of a directive of the High Commissioner on 'Managing the human rights information network'. In addition, various efforts are under way to develop databases that will facilitate electronic management of information relevant to specific human rights mechanisms. The treaty bodies database, for example, is now complemented by a communications database, both of which are linked to the OHCHR Web site and are thus accessible to the experts and to the general public. An internal system for tracking all the human rights complaints addressed to the OHCHR-serviced mechanisms is being developed. This system, entitled CEEPS ('common early entry point system'), was designed to improve coordination between the various mechanisms on similar or even identical communications, which to date has taken place on an ad hoc basis. It thus aims at helping the treaty bodies and special procedures take complementary action and avoid actions that might be contradictory. The continuing development of information management technology will be crucial to facilitating the productive exchange of information.

6. Cooperation and information sharing is also increased when support staff are fully familiar with the work and methodology of the more relevant mechanisms. The first-ever OHCHR induction programme for newly arrived staff members, held in January 2001, was intended to ensure that all OHCHR staff embarked on their duties with an appropriate level of knowledge of the human rights mechanisms. The induction programme included a component on the electronic information systems in use at OHCHR. Similarly, OHCHR organized on 18 May 2001, for the first time, a one-day technical briefing for newly elected members of a treaty body. In this precedent-setting initiative, three new members of the Committee on the Rights of the Child spent one day at OHCHR before attending their first session. Approximately half of the programme was dedicated to the role of other treaty bodies and human rights mechanisms. Briefings by OHCHR staff were followed by discussion sessions.

7. In addition, a number of inter-branch task forces, working groups and ad hoc initiatives serve as permanent conduits for the exchange of information and help ensure that OHCHR activities are based on input from all relevant mechanisms. Further systematization and expansion of such exchanges is clearly needed, but may be difficult to achieve without a significant increase in available resources. Small teams or individual staff members struggling to service one or several mandates are constrained in their capacity to take full account of all available information, or to promote increased and effective cooperation with a very broad range of other mechanisms.

8. Information on existing practices has been collected and summarized, to facilitate discussion of the existing status of cooperation and information sharing, particularly with regard to the recommendations made by experts and staff during the discussions held in June 2000. Both for treaty bodies and for special mandate holders, four factors can be seen to play a role in determining the amount and extent of cooperation and information sharing that are already taking place. Addressing these factors will be the key to achieving further progress in increasing the exchange of information and facilitating cooperation.

9. The first important factor is the extent to which the activities in question are considered confidential. For example, some mandate holders generally object to information about their proposed missions being widely shared while delicate negotiations are still under way, and treaty bodies or mandate holders would generally not release information relating to confidential inquiry procedures. However, confidentiality should not be a major barrier for information sharing on the vast majority of activities of the various human rights mechanisms.

10. The second influential factor is the extent to which mandates are relevant to the work of a treaty body or special procedure. Several treaty bodies have developed more advanced working relationships with specific special procedures because of the related nature of their respective mandates, most clearly in the case of the Committee against Torture (CAT) and the Special Rapporteur on the question of torture and to a lesser extent in the case of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and the Special Rapporteur on racism, or of the Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Representative of the Secretary-General on children and armed conflict. The same may be said of the relationships developed between the treaty bodies and other United Nations human rights mechanisms (such as the Board of the Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture and CAT, or the Sub-Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and CERD). Where mandates are clearly relevant, treaty body experts are routinely provided with all the reports of the special procedures. In the case of the Human Rights Committee (HRC), when information is available but has less direct relevance to the work of the Committee, such as information of a general nature that does not directly address the provisions of specific treaty articles, it is provided initially only to the country rapporteur, who will determine whether it should be distributed to the whole Committee.

11. The third important factor is the nature of the working methods of each treaty body and special procedure. The active involvement of staff supporting country mandates (and occasionally of mandate holders directly) in the work of treaty bodies is facilitated for those treaty bodies that either have pre-sessional or sessional working groups in Geneva to prepare for the examination of State reports, or benefit from extensive secretariat analytical support that can readily absorb such input. In the first case, the working groups provide a forum that the relevant staff or mandate holders can address with the latest information available to them that they are willing to share with the treaty bodies. In the latter case, the committee secretariat, in providing analytical support to those treaty bodies that request it, routinely consults the documentation of the relevant special mandates and the staff servicing them and transmits information from the special mandate holders to the treaty bodies (e.g. CRC, the Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) and, recently, CAT). However, the use of special procedures information (or of documentation from other treaty bodies) is, in some treaty bodies, constrained by a reluctance to use information from sources other than State reports. In other treaty bodies, it is left to the discretion of the country rapporteurs.

12. Similarly, the use of treaty body information on countries (particularly concluding observations, but also reports and other documentation) is well established among the staff servicing country mandates or preparing country visits by any of the special procedures mandate holders. Yet mandate holders may not be aware of the extent to which such information is consistently (almost systematically) used by their own support staff.

13. In contrast to the country mandates, the involvement of thematic mandates in the country work of treaty bodies is embryonic save in a few exceptional cases, such as those listed in paragraph 8 above. Such involvement has been fruitful when the examination of a specific country situation by a treaty body and a special procedure coincide (e.g. CRC and the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on internally displaced persons in the examination of the situation of Colombia).

14. Reference to treaty body material in the work of the thematic mandates is increasingly being encouraged, with the support staff for some thematic mandates having very close working relationships with the staff supporting the more relevant treaty bodies (e.g. the Activities and Programmes Branch thematic team and CRC staff; the Research and Right to Development Branch economic and social rights team and CESCR staff). Support for such cooperative approaches is growing at all levels within OHCHR and is only limited in practice by workload pressure. Increasing the number of mandates and staff members cooperating on any given issue ensures a better quality result but can be time consuming and is not always possible under time constraints. Greater efforts are often made for special events (e.g. CRC and CESCR days of discussion) but can be hard to sustain on a longer-term basis.

15. As for direct contact between treaty bodies and special procedures mandate holders, some limited examples already exist between specific mandates. While such encounters can be fruitful and lead to increased awareness of the need and potential for improved cooperation, they can also become token gestures that do not lead to significant changes in outlook, partly owing to a strong sense of the unique role of each mandate felt by many experts and partly owing to reluctance to institute the changes to working methods that might be required in order to improve cooperation.

16. The fourth important factor that affects the extent of information exchange and cooperation among mechanisms is that of resources. In most cases, budgetary constraints restrict direct contacts between special procedures and treaty bodies to those that are at the initiative of special procedure mandate holders. Given the large number of individuals involved in the work of the treaty bodies, the fixed calendar for their meetings and the strict limitations imposed on the use of the regular budget funds allotted to the treaty bodies, it is practically impossible for treaty bodies to rearrange their meeting schedules to accommodate a visit from a special mandate holder or to use their funds to invite a special mandate holder to participate in a session. Most treaty bodies have experienced the frustration of wanting to meet with one or more mandate holders to discuss specific issues but of being unable to do so for lack of funds. It would be more feasible for individual mandate holders to plan a mission to Geneva at a time when a treaty body is holding a session. This occurs occasionally, or even regularly with respect to CAT and the Special Rapporteur on torture, and is more likely when a country of particular interest to the mandate holder is being examined by a committee or on days of general discussion on a theme of particular relevance to a mandate holder (for example, in the case of CRC and the mandate holders for the sale of children and involvement of children in armed conflict, CESCR and the Special Rapporteurs on the right to education and housing, CERD and the Special Rapporteur on racism). On rare occasions, the availability of limited extra-budgetary resources (notably through the Plans of Action for the treaty bodies) has made it possible for treaty bodies to invite mandate holders, on an exceptional basis, to participate in such discussions (e.g. in September 2000, CRC and the Special Rapporteur on torture). In the case of HRC, it has not met with mandate holders for any special discussion but includes three among its membership.

17. The question of resources cannot be ignored and should be considered in the discussion on how to continue improving the productive exchange of information. The systematic provision of extensive information to all treaty body members and special procedures mandate holders on all the relevant activities of all the other mechanisms could be a costly initiative, the usefulness of which would likely be limited to a small number of experts with the capacity to dedicate a substantial amount of their time to their United Nations responsibilities; in most cases, treaty body members and mandate holders have only limited time to allocate to their mandates when not in session or on mission. Providing information between sessions and missions will involve additional costs, particularly in the case of those experts who do not have access to electronic communications and information retrieval technology. Distribution of a list of all forthcoming missions of special mandate holders, for example - a request that has recently been addressed - would be considerably facilitated if the information could be made available for electronic retrieval, rather than individually transmitted to all experts.

18. The suggestion that there should be systematic distribution of executive summaries of the reports of special mandate holders should be considered in this regard. A mechanism can be found to facilitate separate automatic distribution of these summaries. One example of such distribution is the current automatic distribution by e-mail to all OHCHR staff of the daily summaries prepared on treaty body sessions. It should not be difficult to ensure automatic electronic distribution within OHCHR, as well as to experts, of all executive summaries as soon as they are finalized. A first initiative in that sense has been the collection and publication in 2001 of the executive summaries of all special procedures reports, in a document recently distributed to all experts.

19. In addition, the desirability of providing additional information from those mandates or treaty bodies whose relevance to each other is less direct needs to be considered in view of the large volume of information already provided to the experts. The six treaty bodies collectively issue concluding observations on more than one hundred State reports every year, hold three or four thematic discussions, adopt an average of three or four new General Comments/Recommendations in addition to more specific decisions or recommendations, and adopt views on dozens of individual communications. For their part, the 44 special procedures produce almost one hundred reports every year, including annual thematic reports (with some mandates reporting separately to the Commission on Human Rights and to the General Assembly) and reports on country missions. The usefulness of a special system to ensure extensive information sharing can be questioned, particularly as experts can already ask to have their home address included in the list for automatic distribution of all human rights documents officially issued by the United Nations.

20. Even for staff members, engaged on a full-time basis with their mandates and with easier access to OHCHR information, automatic distribution of all possibly relevant information can become overwhelming. The crucial long-term challenge will be to improve information management systems to allow the automatic retrieval of all relevant information when needed (by theme or by country). The immediate challenge is to ensure that staff members are fully aware of what information is available and know how to retrieve it when necessary as a routine part of their functions.

21. On 15 May 2001, a meeting was convened to review the issue of information exchange with all OHCHR team leaders supervising staff working for treaty bodies and special procedures and dealing with information management. The meeting concluded that gatherings of all relevant staff would be too large for productive discussion. The team leaders committed themselves to placing the improvement of information exchange and cooperation on the agenda of their routine team meetings. A number of suggestions to highlight examples of productive cooperation were made, and will be followed up at the team level.

2. A/55/206, para. 86.